A new translation of Oecumenius’ Commentary on Revelation, plus an article on using your phone to scan articles (and other snippets)

A couple of interesting items have reached me this week.

Firstly, John Litteral has prepared and published a translation of Oecumenius, “Commentary on the Apocalypse” (CPG 7470).  It’s based on the editions of Hoskier and De Groote (see the Wiki article here).  The author has made it freely available online at Archive.org here.  He’s also included excerpts from other commentaries by Oecumenius, where he references the same passage.  The work is perhaps the earliest commentary on Revelation, and probably dates to around 700 AD.  A look at Amazon shows that the translator has made a number of translations of material by Oecumenius.  Grab yours there!

The second item is by the excellent Rob Bradshaw, who will be known to many as the digitizer of theological papers at his website, http://theologyontheweb.org.uk/.  It’s a tutorial in how to scan books and articles, using a mobile phone, and doing so carefully!  It’s on his blog here.  Useful if we need to do it!

Next, an email from French scholar “Albocicade”, on a quotation that I placed online quarter of a century ago, and attributed to Tertullian by C. G. Jung – or, at least, so I thought back then, having found it somewhere online:

He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.

Dr A. has located what may be the real source among the Sentences of Publilius Syrus (or Publius Syrus):

Avarus, nisi cum moritur, nihil recte facit.

Fascinating!

Finally – I’ve been adding these as I work down my inbox! – a note about the translation of ps.Hegesippus which was made by Wade Blocker and was uploaded in 2005 to my site by the permission of his son David Blocker.  Carson Bay in his “Biblical Heros and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity: The Historiography, Exemplarity, and Anti-Judaism of Pseduo-Hegesippus”, Cambridge (2022), p.33, comments on modern translations (emphasis mine):

De Excidio will have been accessible to many European readers by the seventeenth century. Yet, for all that, in recent years it has hardly been translated afresh. Dominique Estève’s dissertation does include a French translation of Books 1–4, but this translation was never formerly published and is very difficult to access.101 The only other modern translation of which I know is that produced by Wade Blocker in 2005 and made available online by Roger Pearse.102 While this translation cannot be used uncritically, it has rendered the text popularly accessible. Blocker’s was always a nonscholarly translation, not designed for publication, and criticisms like those lodged by Leah Di Segni (published on Roger Pearse’s website) are unnecessary and unhelpful. More apt is Richard Pollard’s comment that Blocker’s translation is “useful if inelegant.”103

So: Historically De Excidio has been widely accessible. The Latin manuscript tradition was robust and diffuse, the early print tradition witnessed many printings and translation into at least three languages, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries issued two critical editions. The lack of a usable modern translation has surely contributed more than a little to the text’s anonymity and disuse in more recent years. I anticipate producing a translation of De Excidio in the future, and the block translations in the present book mark a step in that direction.

Myself I am grateful to Leah Di Segni for her feedback, but Dr Bay is undoubtedly right in the line that he takes.  The fact is that there is no scholarly translation, and we are all the richer for Wade Blocker’s work.  If Dr B. follows through with his intention to make one, that would be wonderful!